Alia Malek has an important expose in the latest Nation about “Gitmo in the heartland” – two federal prisons that incarcerate mostly Muslim prisoners under inhumane conditions. Many of these men are Arab, many are charged with having “terrorist links,” when in fact these are nonviolent men who have for instance given money to charities that have a connection with Hamas.
The prisons have a great euphemistic name– “communications management units.” They isolate prisoners from their own families, limiting visits and imposing “an absolute ban on contact visits.” All communication is through glass, and prisoners and families are required to speak only in English. Malek talked about the story yesterday on WNYC in New York, stressing that this Bush-era policy has been sustained by Obama.
At minute 16 or so in that interview, an animal rights activist who was imprisoned in a CMU calls in to describe his incarceration. He says that most of the prisoners were “Arab nationals or Muslims” and were there for political crimes, supporting unpopular political causes in the U.S. From Malek’s piece in the Nation:
[A]s of this writing, the BOP [federal Bureau of Prisons] reports that eighteen of thirty-three prisoners at Terre Haute [Indiana] (55 percent) and twenty-three of thirty-six at Marion [Illinois] (64 percent) are Muslim. Muslims make up just 6 percent of the federal prison population….
[As of Fall 2010] His wife] Majida [Salem] hadn’t seen Ghassan since.. Thanksgiving [2009], when he was still at the low-security prison in Seagoville, Texas, not far from their home. He was moved to Marion in April 2010. The distance ended their weekly visits and essentially left Majida to raise a family of six children, the youngest of whom had Down syndrome, by herself.
They tried to maintain contact nonetheless. Majida shared her weekly fifteen-minute call with her children and in-laws, co-parenting with Ghassan in these morsels and through e-mails, which arrived days after they were written and only after a detour through Washington. Other CMU families had given up on visits or stopped bringing the children, who were often traumatized by the inability to touch their fathers or speak to them in a native language….
Ghassan’s incarceration at Marion demonstrates one of the biggest problems with the CMUs and with the terrorist designation generally—how broadly and capriciously they are applied. “It is one thing to use restrictive isolationist tactics against the leader of a gang or terror group who, if he could communicate freely with the outside world, would wreak violence on innocent people—that’s not an illusory concern,” says David Cole, of Georgetown University Law School and The Nation’s legal affairs correspondent. “But when you define ‘terrorist activity’ to include material support that can involve no violent activity and no intentional support of violent activity, then you are relegating nonviolent offenders to these very extreme conditions that are entirely unwarranted.”
To the government, however, Ghassan [Elashi, at the Marion CMU] —co-founder of the Holy Land Foundation, once the largest US Muslim charity—was a material supporter of terrorism. Ghassan has never been accused of engaging in violence, but because the HLF sponsored schools and social welfare programs in the Occupied Territories alleged by Washington to be controlled by Hamas, he was charged with materially supporting terrorism. He was convicted in November 2008, following a 2007 mistrial in which the government failed to convince jurors of its case.
